Priscilla Pope-Levison

Priscilla Pope-Levison, award-winning author, historian, pastor, professor, and higher education administrator, has a heart for the ancient yet contemporary Christian practice of evangelism. While she admits its negative stereotypes, she is not deterred from moving the discussion about evangelism – and its practice – forward. She responds to this hesitancy in her upcoming book, Models of Evangelism (Baker Academic, 2020), by taking evangelism back to its basics. In this superb book, she gathers together her vast experience over several decades of teaching, speaking, and writing into a compelling and coherent one-stop shop for all things evangelism. Not everyone has been reluctant about evangelism, and in several previous books, she has unearthed these proponents. Consider the large cadre of North American women who built evangelistic institutes, often with pennies earned selling baskets of apples. These women and their accomplishments came to life in two books, award-winning Building the Old Time Religion: Women Evangelists in the Progressive Era (NYU Press, 2015) and Turn the Pulpit Loose: Two Centuries of American Women Evangelists (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). Take into account too the prominence of evangelism among Latin American liberation theologians, both Catholic and Protestant. She focused on these theologians in her first award-winning book, Evangelization in a Liberation Perspective. Currently, Priscilla is Associate Dean and Professor of Ministerial Studies at Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University. Before coming to Perkins, she was Professor of Theology and Assistant Director of Women’s Studies at Seattle Pacific University for 15 years. She is an ordained United Methodist minister, current participant in the World Methodist Council’s international dialogue with the Roman Catholic Church, and past president of the Wesleyan Theological Society and the Historical Society of the United Methodist Church. She maintains an informative website on American women evangelists: http://www.priscillapopelevison.com